Instant Genius - How the internet shaped how we speak

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Through emojis, memes, acronyms and inside jokes, the internet has forever changed how we communicate. But what is the result of that and what does it mean for how we’ll speak in the future? We spoke to linguist and author of the book Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch, to find out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com. to learn more. Hello, I'm Alex Hughes and this is the Instant Genius podcast, a bite-sized masterclass from the BBC Science Focus magazine. On the internet, via text or even in real life, it can feel like we're speaking a totally new language these days. We use emojis to express how we feel. New internet-based

words are making their way into the dictionary each year and our vocabularies have taken on entirely new styles. But why has all of this happened? Gretchen McCulloch, linguist, author of the book, because internet, and the host of the podcast Lingfusiasm, talks us through this effect, answering the question, how has the internet shaped how we communicate? So we've been tech speaking for years, you know, the likes of MSN, Bebo, MySpace, these earlier forms of internet communication. They've launched over 20, many odd years ago now. In that time, we've seemingly developed new languages, words, ways of speaking, different mannerisms. Has the internet created its own language, or has it just

changed the way that we all communicate? I think the thing that's particularly interesting about the internet when it comes to its effect on how we communicate has been the way that the internet has enabled us to do more informal communication in writing. So before the internet, We still had, you know, casual chats with friends, with family members and this type of thing. But it mostly happened in the spoken domain. And these days, so much more of that happens in writing. You know, you're texting someone to say, can you pick up some milk or do you want to come to my birthday party or any of these sort of casual things that we do? And it used to be much more possible to go through your life after you finish school without really writing at all, unless your job involved writing, you could just sort of not write after that. And now it's so hard to go through even a day without sending people some

texts, maybe posting some things publicly, but even if you're not publicly on social media, you're still coordinating things via text, making these sort of short texts to people. And that's a place where we see a lot of increase in people's desire to express emotions and express intentions in writing, where if writing is only formal to you, you don't. don't need as much of that. And so I assume that's part of the reason that our text language is so much more informal than the way that we tend to speak to people. I don't think that it's so much that text language is more informal than speech.

I think it is that it is as informal as speech. And that what we've traditionally seen as written language has been this edited type of language that shows up in books and newspapers and things like that. And books and newspapers, I want to point out, still exist. And many of them are even available on the internet. But this sort of informal language that we use with each other is also something that is increasingly written and where we have so many more styles available to us. So many more different ways, like you talk differently with different people. You might talk differently with your grandparents versus with your friends or with your kids or your colleagues. And those differences in terms of style of language show up in time. texting as well. And you touch on it a little bit there. Obviously, books, textbooks, most of the

writing that tends to be published is checked and professionally written. It's, you know, the focus is on the grammar and the way that it's written. The internet on the other hand is, I guess, arguably unchecked. The way that we talk to each other is unchecked. Does this lead to, I guess, some bad habits that get picked up on our writing and things that we learn from others when we speak that way? Well, I think that writing that goes through several hands, several editors, it tends to have this sort of homogenizing effect. And because everyone's saying, hey, we'd want to try to converge this so that this book is like all of the other books this press has published or this newspaper article is like all of the other articles this newspaper has published. But when it comes to casual conversation, I want to push back against the idea that there is a bad way to do it, you know? Like, do you want, if you have an editor that shows up when you're down at the pub with your friends who says, oh, no, don't say it that way, your friends are going to think you've got a, you know, a bit of a complex, right? This isn't going to help you seem like you're sort of a relaxed and, you know, fun person to be around if you're constantly speaking like you've got a red pen in your ear or other parts of the body. There are multiple purposes that language can have. And one of those is bonding with people and being informal and casual and friendly.

And none of those things are really served by having someone say, well, what if you were just like everyone else? So is a better way to, I guess, show your own personality through this style of language? Exactly. Show your own personality. And to also show your acknowledgement and your respect for and your camarader with the person you're talking to. Because we naturally tend to converge a little bit with the people that we're talking to sometimes. You think about if you, you know, reach for your glass of water at the same time as someone else reaches for their glass, because you're sort of syncing up with them. So if your language syncs up a little bit with someone because you're talking with them and you want to converge on something, that's a way of showing that you have solidarity, that you have friendship, that you have comradeship, you're getting along with them. And then if your language converges with someone else in a different context, you can also get along better with that person in that context. You don't have to always be like this very sort of starched and formal, you know, showing up the pub with a full suit on type of person.

I do find quite interesting the idea of this personality when you go out into the real world and you communicate in a way that is, you know, maybe a bit more relaxed. You're not thinking, as you say, like you have someone fact-checking in your language right behind you. The language of the internet, when your writing is more productive, you know, when people shorten words or phrases or they use these acronyms to get by, those have all become quite common in the real world. you know, people use something like OMG instead of, oh my God, where it's something with the same amount of syllables and it loses that productivity when it goes into the real world. Is this, again, just one of those things where it really doesn't matter? And it is just a case of these are habits that we pick up on

and learn to use in our real world. Yeah, I think that initially something like OMG for, oh my God, has this effect of shortening, it increases efficiency because you only have to type three letters instead of however many are in the full phrase. And then as you say, when you say OMG out loud, it's the same number of syllables as, oh my God, so is it really adding an additional sense of efficiency? And in that case, I think it's also showing a certain type of personality, showing that, okay, I'm the kind of person who spends a lot of time on the internet or who is

familiar with this type of slang. And then at a certain point, it becomes instead of, oh, I'm this particular type of person, that this is just a word that's in the language that people have picked up on that weren't necessarily aware of its original context. So I've heard young children, like preliterate children, before they're old enough to be online, before they're old enough to be texting, saying, OMG. And when I've asked them what they think it stands for, they either don't know or they very charmingly think it stands for, oh my gosh. So this is an example of something that has sort of crossed over from this. But creating words out of acronyms is certainly not new. It is a little bit newer than sometimes people think. It seems to date from approximately the Second World War. So there was a lot of military acronyms, you know, things like snafu or. or radar that were originally made out of acronyms. But also, there was a language game from the mid-1800s in the U.S. where they were making words with sort of pseudo-deliberate misspellings. And one of these was OK, which originally stood for a playful spelling of all correct, spelled O-L-L-K-O-R-E-C-T. So instead of writing like A-C, I guess,

which would be all correct. They wrote OK, which was all correct. And then it got popularized through political campaign and through various things. And there were a whole bunch of examples of words that were part of this language game. And OK is the only one that stuck around. So I think that, you know, in 100 years when we're looking back on what's the influence of this era, it's going to be like, okay, there were a bunch of acronyms that were in use at the time. And a few of them, and OMG is a good candidate for one or WTF, are going to stick around and are going to kind of become unrooted from this origin and acronyms, whereas other perhaps more obscure ones like AFICT as far as I can tell, like that one seems a little bit less likely to cross over

into spoken language, to become part of this thing that children are using. But something like OMG, where, you know, kids really are using this already, has this potential to stick around in a hundred years. It'll just be another expression like any other. I think there is a trend that we often see where we talk about the internet or technology in its effect and give it blame or say that it's doing something that's never happened before. But then when you look back, you realize, say, you know, the effect of a newspaper, it's still happening.

It still was happening. It's just that we all see it play out a bit more over the internet. I guess that's the same with things like the acronyms where everyone's just more familiar with these ones from the internet than we can remember the ones from years and years and years ago. Right. And a lot of people probably don't even know that it were like radar or laser started as an acronym because they're just produced as if they're words.

I think another thing that's interesting is that internet language, which we think of as this very technologically mediated type of thing, and very dependent on smartphones or in computers and things like that, has deeper histories if we look at it as a style of informal writing. And one of the things that I looked at when I was researching because internet was archival postcards. And I found this brilliant book of postcards from the Beatles. And, you know, most of the Beatles produced postcards that were relatively standard. But George Harrison produced postcards that read like a text from your grandmother. He's got all these dot, dots in them. He's got this sort of, you know, X, X, and he draws a little smiley faces sometimes. And you're like, oh, if I transcribe this,

This looks like it's a short message, but it's got the sort of greeting and the much love at the end and this sort of stuff. This looks like it's on a continuum with how, especially people who remember the pre-internet era, treat internet writing as this kind of informal written genre. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what your people. building. Fit for your ambition for citizens back. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, name and focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering,

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for more information. Something I wanted to touch on is this idea that we are all learning new language from the internet and we're all experiencing the internet and its way that it changes our language. But arguably we all kind of experience a different corner of the internet. You know, it might change for your age, your gender, the country you're from. In a way, are we all kind of learning a different language from the internet based on our algorithms and the sort of bits the we're seeing in being fed. I think it's easy to attribute this to the internet itself as a technology,

but what we're really experiencing is each other. And that gets to your idea of the corners of the internet or what we're being fed. And what we're experiencing is each other less mediated through the accents of geography, for example. So you're not sort of only interacting with people who happen to live on your block or go to your school or work at your job. You're able to interact with people around a common interest or around other types of things that sort of pull people together and that they don't necessarily have to be living in the same area as you and you're not as constrained by geography so other factors can emerge as things for people to bond around. So it's widened our horizons essentially.

Yeah, I think to some extent. I think people still have some tendency to, you know, have some tendency to, you know, cluster with people who are similar to them in various ways. ways. And, you know, the internet is not bound by location, but it is sort of interestingly stratified by time zone because you're still going to be awake at the same time if you want to be interacting in real time with people, for example. And not just from the internet, but from, I guess, this idea of us talking more often and more informally, is there some, I guess, unusual traits in our language that have come from this? I think the easiest one to see are traits that rely on writing as a medium. So use of punctuation in creative ways. You know,

when face-to-face conversation, we have all these sorts of intonation and gestures that we can add to our literal words that we're saying. Like we don't often sort of speak to each other in disembodied robotic monotones. I think not very many people would enjoy that. And so using punctuation, especially punctuation to convey sarcasm or or irony. And there's been a desire to have a way of conveying sarcasm or irony in writing. The first documented time that somebody wished for an ironic punctuation mark was in 1575. This is not a new desire. And then there's a proposal from the philosopher Rousseau that he wished that there was a point, an ironic point, an ironic mark. There are subsequent proposals that really go through the

centuries is at least one in each century and then it keeps accelerating. And internet writing has enabled us to do sarcastic and ironic punctuation, but in a way that's actually more subtle than those original proposers would have dreamed of. Because they were proposing, oh, well, if I had this one punctuation mark, then everyone would know that I was definitely being sarcastic. But the thing with sarcasm is it doesn't work like that. Because we already have a tool for enabling people to know that we mean exactly what we're saying, and that's called not being sarcastic. I have this ability already, and it doesn't rely on a punctuation mark. I could just say things in a non-sarcastic way. The appeal of sarcasm is that it's sort of a linguistic trustfall. It's taking a certain level

of risk, because if I say, oh, what brilliant weather we're having and it's pouring rain and sleeting, you have to know, okay, yes, I'm not a huge fan of pouring rain and sleet, and here's this context and so on and so forth. And by saying not literally what I mean, the other person understanding that is what gives us this sense of deeper connection because we both have this awareness of what's really meant. But if I don't take this risk, and if I make sarcasm completely unrisky by creating an unambiguous sarcasm mark, then I haven't actually achieved the thing that I'm looking to do via sarcasm. So the tools that modern day internet users used to convey sarcasm are a whole range of punctuation marks. Sometimes you may use capitals

when you don't actually mean that something needs to be capitalized. Sometimes people use a dot, dot, dot, dot. Sometimes people use a hyphen or swung dash, little twiddle on the top corner of your keyboard. Sometimes people use certain types of emoji, sparkle emoji, or like a smile or like an upside-down smile where no smile is meant. I can see you nodding as if, yeah, I've experienced all of these. And what people tell me when I say, well, sometimes the dot, dot, dot can be interpreted as sarcastic or passive-aggressive is, oh my God, how am I supposed to know what I'm doing? Am I accidentally being sarcastic? And fortunately or unfortunately, that's the risk that irony thrives on. If you don't have a glimmer of a potential for misinterpretation, you haven't actually taken the risk that gives you the true reward of feeling like, oh yeah, this person understands. me because this person understands my sarcasm. They know when I'm being, giving a double meaning. There was a little bit of starting talking about it then. And I think we can't really talk about digital communication without touching on them. But emojis, you know, no matter how much

you use the internet, how much you communicate online, everyone's very aware of it and aware of, I guess, the meaning of certain ones. How was that sort of evolved where we've become so reliant on emojis for that emotional side of messaging? like to think of emoji as one kind of digital gesture because, you know, you can add a gesture to the literal words you're saying and affect how it gets interpreted. If you say something like thanks with your eyes rolled or with a thumbs up or with, you know, the middle finger, you're creating a very different type of interpretation of that same utterance, thanks. Is this being sincere? Is this being like, oh, thanks for nothing?

where, what do you mean by this thanks in this context? You know, I think this has calmed down a lot. Initially, when emojis were coming into being, some people were saying, oh, well, we'll just not type any words at all. We'll just type everything entirely in emojis. I think everyone realizes that's not the case anymore. Because, you know, it's not particularly practical. There are a lot of words that are not easy to depict as a series of little pictures that have more abstract meanings. but they do have this useful role for adding in additional context to what you're saying, which is also a role that can be filled by other types of things, you know, whether that's plain text emoticons, like just a colon and parenthesis, or whether that's, you know, judicious use of punctuation marks, whether that's, you know, capitalization, this type of thing.

There are various ways we can use to add that additional meaning. You know, it's entirely possible one of these days that. the young people are going to decide that emoji or an old people thing and stop using them for a while. I think they're likely to sort of cycle in and out of trends, perhaps. You know, you never really know, but I think they're sort of part of the ecosystem and the overall desire to have what you say also contain something about what you mean about it is something that I think isn't going to go away, even if the particular tools that we use to express that additional layer of meaning shift and change depending on the trends and what young people think.

think it's cool and things like that. We're just relying on the young people. They're leading the way. Exactly. Well, I think I think young people have this particularly useful role in the ecosystem, which is that they're in a social environment in which the emotional stakes are very important. And the sort of analyzing every single message for what it really means, do you think this person likes me back? Do you know, is this person think I'm cool or not? This is very highly charged. When you get a bit older and you know who your friends are, it becomes a little bit less necessary to read extra meaning into every single punctuation mark. So one of the other forms of communication that I think is, for most people,

be very obvious when it comes to the internet is memes. Is that something that you've researched much while you've been doing your book or through the podcast? Yeah. So I looked into memes when I was researching because internet, but I ended up reading this book about the history of the oral tradition by Walter J. Ong. just a couple years after writing the book and I talked about it on my podcast Lengthusiasm because I wish that I had read it before I wrote the book. So Ong in his book talks about how

memory is preserved in the oral tradition by repeating things in memorable formats. So if you think of something like a proverb or a saying, something like Red Sky at Night, Sailor's Delight, or Measure twice cut once, these are preserved because they're in very memorable units. And they have a rhythm to them, a meter to them. They rhyme. It's easy to remember the second half because you have the first half that sets up the rhyme and the second half that fills out the rhyme. And that in an oral culture, you end up repeating these very fixed expressions because it's really hard to preserve information. And in a written culture, the inverse is the case, becomes much, much, much easier to preserve information. And then the thing that gets a very very important. valued is sort of virtuosic riffing off the written form. You don't want to just have a book that reproduces all of the sentences that were said in all the other books. You want to have a book that does something new, whereas in an oral culture, you really need to preserve by re-saying all of the stuff the ancestors said to you, because otherwise there's no way that it gets passed

down. And really important information, like predicting the weather, doesn't get transmitted to the next generation unless you're constantly repeating things. So the way this fits into memes is that there's a drive, there's a tendency. People sometimes say, oh, well, you know, the internet is so oral. But in fact, memes are this epitome of written culture because the thing that makes a meme good is that you have the previous reference of the meme and then you create a version of that meme that's your own spin on it. And then you can pass that around. And this idea that there's multiple versions and you're creating your own spin, your own riff on something, that's something that's such a feature of written culture taken to its utter extreme. And yeah, so I put that in an episode of Linkthusiasm on oral cultures and literate

cultures because I wish I'd been able to put it in, because internet, but, you know, there you go. A book is fixed in a period of time and it doesn't keep evolving and changing the way that's something that's more oral like a podcast can do. I am interested how you think the internet will. well, internet and any of this kind of communication will shape language as we go further into the future. Obviously, in the grand scheme of the, you know, civilization, we're not that far into this kind of era. Do you think it all kind of continue down this way? Or do you think it will just be in the same way that we've had it so far, little bits here and there that we pick up into our vocabulary or the way that we chat and communicate?

One of the things that I think is particularly interesting about more recent internet developments is the increase of use of online video. and especially short form online video, you know, TikTok, but also Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts and all of this sort of stuff. And the way that this counters some of the things I've been saying about the internet being very text-based, but also that these videos are not the same as having a conversation face-to-face with someone

because they're often very highly edited. So people will record themselves, like having an imaginary conversation with sort of two different versions, two different people who are both played by themselves or sometimes three, four, five, many different people. And one of them's me, and one of them's me with like a hat on. And one of them is me with a different shirt. And sort of facing different directions to edit that all together and stitch that together

into something that reads as an imaginary constructed dialogue that I'm having with myself in different personas to convey something that I think is true or funny or interesting about life, about society. You know, you see younger people sometimes making conversations with like their parents, but their parents is played by themselves, this type of thing. But sometimes it's between two historical figures or fictional characters or anything like that. And that's a style that has a relationship to what we do and we're telling a story offline as well. Like we will sometimes put on a bit of a persona or lean a bit to the left or to the right to convey, oh, I'm telling the story about this thing that happened to me last week and here are the different people who are in that.

story, but this creating a further stylized way of doing it, I think it's democratizing some of the tools of video editing that used to be a much more specialized skill and that a lot of people have as a just a more social skill now because the tools to do so have gotten easier to use. So this is something that I think there are aspects of this that can get imported into regular conversation because, you know, speech is a lot closer to regular conversation than writing. but also that this is not a natural conversation any more than something else that's highly edited is. It is this deliberately constructed piece of entertainment. So that's somewhere where I look for more developments in the future.

So through the research and writing of your book, through your podcast, your work in general, what feels like, I guess, the most surprising thing you've learned about the internet and our modern way of communicating. it's affected on language. I think one of the most surprising things is that I read this book called Wired Love by Ella Cheever Thayer, which was published in the 1800s. And it's about two telegraph operators who meet quote, quote, online over the wire, the telegraph wire. And they are tapping messages to each other in Morse code because they both work in the telegraph office. And when they're not sending other people's messages, they have a lot of, you know, dead time. in which they can just send messages back and forth. And the thing that was fascinating about it was

that a lot of the things they're worried about, you know, how do you know that this person on the other end of the line is who they say they are? You know, what if this person shows up and you meet them face to face and it turns out to be a disappointment? Really presaged a lot of the things that people think about and worry about when it comes to online communications nowadays when we mean on the internet rather than on the telegraph wire. So I think the thing that surprised me most was how much isn't as new about online communication as we might like to believe it is. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Gretchen McCollock talking about the language of the internet.

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